Rebecca stood in the doorway to the living room, looking at Katie and Morgan, who were fast asleep on the couch, the television playing in the background. Neither had had the foresight or perhaps the desire to lie all the way down so they were slumped toward each other, heads lolling forward, looking more like victims of a double homicide than like co-viewers of a Netflix movie. In fact just now they looked almost like sisters, even though in daylight they bore very little resemblance to each other: Morgan small and straight-haired, elfin, except lacking perhaps in the grace that descriptor implied, and Katie sturdier, curlier, with more heft. When Alexa had come home she’d gone straight upstairs. The old Alexa might have come in and sat down and watched a little bit of whatever Morgan was watching.
Rebecca switched off the TV, and now she could hear a soft knocking at the front door. She looked at her watch—it was nine thirty; this would be Sherri, coming to pick up Katie on her way home from work.
“They’re both asleep,” she said, opening the door. “Come in.” She opened the door wider, and Sherri stepped into the foyer. Ponytail, khakis, blue polo shirt with the derma-you insignia over the pocket.
“Sorry,” Sherri whispered. “I actually thought I might get out a little early tonight, but they kept me all the way through.” She reached up and tightened her ponytail by pulling the two halves of it in opposite directions. It was a funny gesture—more that of a high school track athlete than of a suburban mother.
“Why don’t we let them sleep a little while?” Rebecca said. She led Sherri to the living room and pointed at the couch. “You wouldn’t know it by how they’re sitting, but I think they’re actually comfortable. I’d hate to disturb them. You could stay for a drink? I’ve got some really nice tequila just begging to be mixed with seltzer and a little bit of lime juice. We’ll sit outside, by the pool.” Sherri hesitated and Rebecca said, “Come on! Please? You’d be doing me a favor; I’ll drink far too much if I open this tequila when I’m on my own.”
“Okay,” said Sherri finally. She set her lips together and nodded her head sharply, as though giving herself permission. “Okay, I will. That sounds really nice. Thank you.”
Glasses, ice, limes, seltzer, bottle: together they carried everything out to the pool and set it up on the small table that sat between two lounge chairs, and Rebecca mixed the drinks. A brief evening shower had driven out the day’s humidity, leaving the air crisp and almost cool. The moon was a pale, distant wafer, and there were a few stars scattered about. From the far edge of the lawn Rebecca could hear the gurgling of the small stone fountain Peter had installed for her for Mother’s Day three years before. He’d been so proud of that fountain—she’d always said she wanted a water feature for the yard. He had wanted to get a little gnome to stand beside the fountain “for good luck,” but she’d thought the gnome was creepy and had put her foot down. Now she wished she hadn’t been such a grump about it. If someone had only told her, “He’ll be dead in less than two years!” of course she would have let him get the gnome.
“This tequila is really good,” said Sherri.
“Have more,” said Rebecca. She’d almost finished her drink already. The danger with good tequila was that it went down clean and easy.
“I have to drive Katie home,” said Sherri. “I really shouldn’t.” She tugged again at her ponytail.
“Just take it out,” suggested Rebecca. “Don’t you get a headache, wearing a ponytail all day?”
Sherri shrugged. “No. Sort of. Yeah, I guess.” She reached up and pulled the elastic out. Her hair fell around her shoulders. It was wavy, like Katie’s, and thick, with no sign of a telltale ponytail bump.
“Your hair is so pretty,” said Rebecca. “How come you always wear it pulled back?”
Sherri grimaced. “Oh, I don’t know. I guess it’s just easier, nothing to mess with.” Because of the way the outdoor lights fell, her face was half in shadow and Rebecca couldn’t read her expression. “My husband really liked my hair, and after—after everything that happened, I just sort of wanted to forget. I wanted to be a different person. I almost cut if off! But I settled for a different look. Does that make sense?”
Interesting, Rebecca thought. “That definitely makes sense,” she said. “That definitely makes sense.” Emboldened by the tequila, she felt like reaching over and wrapping Sherri in a bear hug and telling her that everything was going to be okay. She settled for mixing her another drink. “Did he cheat on you?”
There was a pause, during which Rebecca wondered if she’d gone too far.
“Something like that,” Sherri said finally. “It’s complicated.”
“It’s always complicated,” said Rebecca. “Marriage. Right? What’s that thing Dostoyevsky said, about happy families? ‘Happy families are all alike. Every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The same thing goes for marriages, don’t you think?”
“I think so,” said Sherri. “I guess.” Rebecca pushed Sherri’s drink closer to her, in case she hadn’t seen the refill. “I really shouldn’t have another,” said Sherri. “I have to drive Katie home.”
“Let her sleep here,” said Rebecca. “And honestly you can too. We’ve got a guest room that nobody ever uses—it’s all made up.” She belched softly and added, “Whoops.” Then: “The guest room has really nice linens. It’s perennially made up with nice linens.” She hesitated. “Wait, does that mean it’s always made up? Or it’s made up once a year?”
Sherri appeared to consider this question seriously. She took a sip of her drink. “I think once a year would be annually made up,” she said finally. “But I don’t know for sure.” After a moment she said, “In our old house we had a really nice guest room. We hardly ever had guests, but I loved that room.”
Rebecca listened for a moment to the gurgling of the fountain, and something about the moment made her think of earlier friendships, high school and college friendships, when you exchanged confidences with ease, and intimacy was measured by depth rather than longevity.
“If you tell me the bad stuff about your marriage, I’ll tell you the bad stuff about mine,” she said. It must be past ten now, and High Street was quiet. This was an early town, even in summer; by ten o’clock the traffic was sparse, and most of the restaurants in town were finishing up for the night.
“But your marriage wasn’t unhappy,” said Sherri. “From everything you’ve said.”
“Not my marriage to St. Peter,” said Rebecca. “That marriage was happy.”
Sherri’s laugh was a genuine, unexpected sound, like the trill of a bird in the dark. She seemed like someone else entirely when she laughed. “Are you serious, did you really call him St. Peter?”
“Not out loud,” conceded Rebecca. “But in my head—sometimes, yes. He really was the definition of a good person. Kind and funny and thoughtful and sweet. Never in a bad mood. Everybody loved him. I mean it: everybody. Dogs and little kids at the grocery store and old people and people who worked for him and people he worked for.”
“Oh come on now,” said Sherri. “Never in a bad mood?”
“Never.”
“Everybody is in a bad mood sometimes. It’s human nature.”
“Not Peter.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Rebecca sighed. “Okay, maybe very occasionally, if he got overwhelmed at work, or if he didn’t get enough sleep. If he was jet-lagged.” She smiled. “He really liked his sleep. Once he had the flu, and he was in a bad mood for about two weeks. But that was unusual, and in his defense it was a really bad year for the flu. But honestly, that was rare. The minor irritations in life, the crap that gets me cranky? It didn’t even faze him.”
“I’m jealous,” said Sherri. “There are days when I feel like everything gets me cranky.”
“Me too,” said Rebecca. “Me too.” She swiped savagely at her eyes. “I didn’t deserve Peter. He was too good for me.” Her emotions were taking a sharp left turn, and she tried to rein them in. Deep breath, then another: in, out, in, out.
She didn’t deserve Daniel either. Eventually he would figure that out. Her long-term relationship odds were already crummy: fifty-fifty if you were looking at good choices versus bad, zero for two if you were scoring on longevity. If she and Daniel didn’t work out she’d be down to zero for three.
“Of course you deserved him,” said Sherri. “Of course you did.” She reached across the table and squeezed Rebecca’s hand, and the gesture was so unexpected and so kind that Rebecca had to wipe once more at her eyes with her free hand.
“Alexa’s dad was an alcoholic,” she said. She hadn’t talked about Alexa’s father in a very long time—even thinking about him dredged up old feelings, feelings that were as messy and muddled as decomposing leaves in the middle of a forest.
Sherri made a noise that was halfway between a tsk and a sigh. “Oh, no,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”
Rebecca’s second drink was three-quarters gone. “It was one of those leave-in-the-middle-of-the-night situations. Like, I had to get Alexa and myself out of there or I thought something really bad might happen. He wasn’t a jolly drunk who just fell asleep and was sweet and regretfully hung over the next morning. He got really angry when he drank. He turned into another person—an awful person. And he wouldn’t get the help he needed to get better. He tried, a couple of times. But it never stuck.”
Sherri was sitting very still, listening. For a moment, when Rebecca stopped talking, the only sound was the fountain and a very distant siren, probably coming from near the hospital. “So what happened?” Sherri asked. “To make you leave?”
“He drove drunk with Alexa in the car, and that’s when I said, That’s it. I had threatened to leave before, and I knew if I didn’t do it right then, I’d lose my nerve. So that very night, we packed up, and we left. Alexa wasn’t even three.”
Sherri sipped her drink and then said, “Just like that? You left?”
“Just like that. I mean, there was all kinds of legal crap we had to deal with later, lawyers and mediations and the whole bit, but the night we left was the last night we were all three under the same roof. I got full custody of Alexa, and that was it.”
“That was it completely? You don’t even talk to him anymore?”
Rebecca held her hand out in front of her. In the moonlight it looked pale and ephemeral, the hand of a ghost. “Well. Yes and no. He got in touch last year. He wrote me a letter, wanting to see Alexa. Claims to be sober now.”
“What’d you do? What’d you say?”
“I didn’t say anything. I didn’t answer him. I pretended I never got it. I never told Alexa! That’s terrible, right? But he has such a history of disappointing Alexa, when we were together he used to let her down constantly, even though she was so small he didn’t think she noticed or remembered. But I think she did notice. And this was just a couple of months after Peter died. We were all so fragile.” She squinted at Sherri. “You’re the first person I’ve told about that. Do you think I’m awful?”
Sherri snorted in a friendly way, if a snort can be said to be friendly. “My bar for awful is set pretty high,” she said. “So: no. I don’t think that’s awful. I think you did what you had to do.”
“By law he’s allowed to contact her directly once she turns eighteen, which will be in September. I don’t know if he will or not. But at some point I need to have a conversation with her about him.” She turned her head to face Sherri more fully. “See? I’m sure you have nothing quite that bad.”
Sherri held out her glass and said, “Can I have just a smidge more tequila?”
“Of course.” Rebecca wondered if she’d gone too far. “I’m sorry I spilled all that. But it felt good to say it. I never talk about that part of my life. Everybody here seems so perfect, and obviously they’re not, not on the inside, nobody is, but I never feel comfortable sharing this part of my past. It seems sort of shameful and sordid in the context of everybody else. You know what I mean?”
Sherri’s answer could have been mistaken for a breath, it was so soft: “I know.”
Rebecca shifted and turned to face Sherri more fully. “But how about you? What about your ex? Katie’s father? How much is he still in your lives?”
“He’s—” Sherri paused, seeming to be choosing her words carefully. “He’s hard to get in touch with right now. So for now, it’s just me and Katie.” She stretched her arms above her head. She swung her legs to one side of the chaise and stood, wobbling. “I think I’ll wake Katie and we’ll walk home,” she said. “And pick the car up tomorrow, if that’s really all right.”
“Are you sure? You don’t need to leave. Or if you need to get home, you can leave Katie here and I’ll return her in the morning.”
“Thank you. I’m tired. It was a long day. But I’m sure Katie would be delighted to wake up here tomorrow, if you’re positive about that?”
“I’m positive.”
“Do you want me to help get them into bed?”
Rebecca waved her hand. “I might just tip them over and put blankets over them. They’ll be fine. Do you want me to walk with you?”
“No,” said Sherri. “Thank you. You stay with the girls. And, Rebecca—thank you. It was so good to talk.”
After Sherri had gone Rebecca went around the patio straightening the cushions and picking up the glasses and retrieving a stray cocktail napkin from where it had wafted into the shallow end of the pool. (She was definitely drunk; she realized this when she almost slipped into the water reaching with the skimmer to get the napkin.) The pool pump was running quietly and efficiently in its energy-saving night mode. All was peaceful.
It wasn’t until she’d covered up the girls and said good night to Alexa and was lying in her bed, waiting for sleep, that she realized that she’d spilled everything about her history while Sherri had said almost nothing. Again.